Document Destruction - 19 April 2024

I still get a lot of paper documents and statements in the postal mail.  I know enough about email that I do not trust it for reliable delivery, but that is a topic for another screed.  I get regular notices of attempts to "recover" my password that I did not request.  Security - actually computer insecurity - is a real thing.  With all the hacks and breaks in the world, it is still important to clean up your paper trail.  Here is my suggestion.

I start with a paper shredder.  I used to use a strip shredder that produce long strips from the sheets fed into the top.  This was OK, but newer shredders are "crosscut", and they produce "chips" of paper that are far harder to reassemble.  Go for a crosscut shredder; strip shredders are obsolete.

Many years ago, it was sufficient to simply dispose of the shredded strips in the garbage, but this is easily improved (in a defensive cannot-reassemble sense).  I started mixing the shredded paper in with the used cat litter.  I would dump the cat litter into paper grocery bags and put the shredded paper on the bottom.  This may not stop someone from reassembling your shreds, but it will certainly make it unpleasant for them.  If you lack cat litter, coffee grounds will work well as a mixer.

This worked well for a long time, but I have two further improvements to offer.

As a base protocol, I shred anything that has personal information on it, especially anything that has an account number or other ID on it.  However, this helps a reassembler because they have some guarantee that they are spending their time and effort to assemble something of value.  They can even focus on areas and shredded bits that have, say, numbers in the hope that the number will prove to be the account number.  Do not give them any hints.  A simple and effective improvement is to shred a lot of stuff that is generic or not sensitive.  First, shred the envelopes that the documents come in.  Second, shred all the supplementary informaton in the envelope - privacy notices, advertisements, and the like - after you take it out of the envelope.  The shredders tend to clump pages as part of the shredding process, so take things out of the envelopes to disassociate them.  Expanding this, shred nonsensitive information:  junk mail.  This increases the bulk, making it harder to find the good stuff.  Further, it confuses the reassembler because they have far more material to select from.  

The last improvement is probably the most effective.  Compost the shreddings.  I mix my shreds with coffee grounds.  Use your home grounds and augment the bulk with used coffee grounds in bulk from your local coffee shop.  They will be happy to provide you with the day's bag of used grounds.  The used grounds may contain a few paper filters, but they will break down, too.  Mixing shredded paper and coffee grounds in roughly equal parts is a good mix for your compost pile.  I think the coffee grounds qualify as "green" and the paper as "brown".  If you have read much about compost piles, you will recognize that green-brown blending accelerates the compost action.  Be sure to moisten everything to get the pile cooking.  In the short term, the wetted coffee will stain all the paper brown, making it much less legible.  In the long term, you will have dirt for your garden, dirt that cannot be reassembled into anything.  You can add any vegetable or yard trimmings that you wish to your compost.  There are particular warnings against using certain weeds in home composting, and I would strongly recommend against using animal waste of any kind in a garden compost pile - no dairy, no meats, no bones, no grease, and no animal waste.

In summary, the shredded paper and coffee grounds will create a soil amendment that is totally secure and cannot be reassembled or read.  Even the composting process obliterates much of the information on the shreds, so this is pretty good security for a homeowner.

As usual with any security process or advice, adapt this to your particular circumstances.  If you oversee a lot of wealth, this advice may not be sufficient for you.  If you oversee nominal or minimal wealth, this is a low-cost, low-effort way to protect your personal information.

Trickle-down Economics is Really Trickle-Up - 20 January 2024

Inflation has been a key concern of many in the USA for the last year, perhaps longer.  FOX News [sic], in particular, has been banging on President Biden and his "failure" to control inflation, rating it one of the key problems that Biden "must solve".  However, now a more complete truth is coming out, backed by actual data and studies rather than gaslighting (from FOX).

Much of the recent inflation is due to increased corporate profit-taking.  Yeah, I know some will be surprised at this, and even contradict it.  In their effort to stream more profits, the companies are simply hiding behind the headlines and blaming their own actions on the inflation boogey-man.  Here is the behavior laid stark -

The report, compiled by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative think tank, found corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters. Profits drove just 11% of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic, according to the report.

Note that second sentence - profits are driving almost 5x the amount of price growth that has been historic.  

As a shareholder, I am delighted, but as a consumer, hang 'em all!  And the next time you consider the "benefits" of trickle-down economics, remember this, and ask yourself if the explanations of trickle-down economics are complete or if they are masking a deeper strategy better described as trickle-up.

Excel and Big Decisions - 13 October 2023

Friday the Thirteenth is famous for its association with bad luck.  That makes today a fitting day to explore the use of Excel in corporations.

In a recent report, mistakes in Excel programming caused major, embarassing errors in hiring doctors in the UK (reference at the end).  The headline screams "Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'" and the sub-head explains that "Mangled mismatch of formats, macros, and VLOOKUP practice hits wannabe anesthetists".  Although this particular failure is significant to those affected, there is a larger problem that affects us all.  We start from two facts.

One.  Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are nearly impossible to debug, thus they contain numerous errors.

Two.  Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are used to make key decisions in nearly all businesses and institutions.

When we combine these, it is easy to see that key decisions in business and institutions are made based on bad data.  These include billion-dollar decisions as well as smaller decisions in hiring and promotion.  I spent years building budget and planning spreadsheets on behalf of my boss, often working with another, more skilled Excel practitioner and budgetmaster (hi, Nick!).  After many, many errors, we taught each other to put debug checks into our spreadsheets.  Not only did we sum across the matrix, but we summed down the matrix and compared the results.  As one example, we would build large matrices of spending or staffing numbers, and if the result of sum-across did not equal the result of sum-down, a cell in the sheet would turn red with a warning.  We were careful to cut-and-paste links rather then values, so that if the original values changed, the links would update.  (This cut-and-paste is a manual operation, so it was subject to errors, but we tried.)  These sheets would be used to create plans for hiring of staff and interns for the coming year, a critical decision that could cause us to fail to me business objectives if the numbers were wrong.  If our budget was too low, we might lack the staff necessary to do the work; if our budget were too high, we would overspend (and no one ever got Executive sympathy for overspending).  

In this particular report (from The Register), some bad hiring decisions were made for doctors in the UK, but we all know that mergers and acquisitions are decided based on Excel calculations.  M&A can be measured in billions of dollars.

To be fair, Excel, itself, is not the direct cause of the problem.  Excel is merely doing what the programmers are telling it to do.  Excel will happily sum 11 months of costs and report the sum to a reader expecting to see 12 months of costs.  And so on.  The fault is that Excel is not designed to allow programmers to detect and fix errors.  Further, most of the "programmers" are business people, not trained computer programmers, and so they lack many of the programming disciplines required to produce reliable, usable code (Excel macros, in this case).  

To fix this problem, Microsoft needs to add checking and debugging features to Excel and the Excel programming community needs to learn to use them.  I do not expect this to happen any time soon.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunder/?td=rt-3a

A Shining Example of Bitcoin, Not - 3 March 2023

SBF, or Sam Bankman-Fried, was the head of the FTX exchange for bitcoin and other digital coinage.  He has been in the news for quite a while, starting as a wonder-boy who could do no wrong and morphing into a financial criminal of grand proportions (as alleged by the US Department of Justice).  It was revealed today that $9 Billion of customer funds is missing.  Sam is going to give Bernie Madoff a run for his money as they compete to be the masterminds of their respective "largest financial fraud ever".

https://gizmodo.com/ftx-sbf-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-1850183784

Gizmodo reports that "FTX Confirms $9 Billion in Customer Funds Vanished" via FTX and Alameda Research (Sam's other company).

Photo: deeper and deeper: measuring snow in Redmond WA on 26 Feb 2023.

Jouralists say Amazon Alexa to lose $10 Billion in 2022 - 23 November 2022

Journalists at Business Insider are claiming that the hardware division of Amazon is on track to lose $10 Billion (with a B) in 2022 because of Alexa.  The story has been picked up by other news sources and is being repeated as factual.  Let us look closer at the claims.

The report at Ars Technica says:

The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year.

Engineers are paid a lot of money and they get a lot of benefits, so engineers are expensive.  Engineers at high-tech Internet companies are paid even better than average (e.g., Facebook and Google engineers are better paid than AMD and Intel engineers).  To understand the situation, we need to make some assumptions.

First, although the article blames "the vast majority" of the losses on Alexa, let us just assume all the losses are due to Alexa and stick with the $10B.  Further, let us assume that Alexa makes no money and that $10B represents the entire cost of the Alexa organization.  Other articles claim that hardware products are sold "at cost", so we assign zero to the cost of consumer products sold (the cost will equal the income, therefore having no impact on our estimates).  As a generous guess, let us assume that the annual cost of an engineer is $500000 (half a million bucks), including benefits and overhead (building rent, computer equipment, heat, health benefits, stock grants, and so on).  This is high, but it is an average across engineers and it is based on industry knowledge.  

If we take the claimed loss of $10B and divide by the $500K, we get 20000 engineers.  I am pretty confident that Amazon does not have 20K engineers working in the hardware division.  Elsewhere in the article, it is claimed that Amazon as a whole is eliminating 10K jobs (e.g., CNBC report) out of 1 million or more employees.  But remember that most of those 1 million jobs are at the entry level in the warehouses (fulfillment centers) and are about $15/hour or about $30K annualized.  Converting that to a "loaded salary" is still only about $60K per year, so it would take almost 170K employees to achieve a $10B savings in lay-offs.

So if the number of laid-off employees does not match the headline, it must be the amount of the losses that is wrong.  And I submit the losses are exaggerated.  Significantly exaggerated.  

Because we are talking about sad things like lay-offs, I have attached a picture of a cat as a palate cleanser.

The ABC trifecta of Art, Blockchain, and Crypto - 17 November 2022

Music is not often associated with technology, but this Spotify track offers brilliant treatment of the blockchain and crypto circus that has gripped techbros for the last couple years.

Crypto $oy or Crypto Boy.

I am not sure how to insert the "bitcoin currency" symbol that the artist uses, so I had to insert a dollar sign.  salem ilese has created a nice ballad for your favorite crypto enthusiast.  To be complete, I further acknowledge the songwriting skills of Alma Goodman, Henry Tucker, Marc Sibley, Nathan Cunningham, and salem ilese.

ETA: put the year 2022 in the Title.

Elon and Twitter - 28 April 2022

Elon Musk did not like something about Twitter, so he threatened to buy it to take it private, and then change something or other.  He yarbled about "free speech" but did not make a coherent statement of the problem he sought to solve nor of the solution that he would impose to solve this hypothetical problem.  

After fussing publically for a bit, he actually came up with a $42B (billion) offer that the Twitter Board of Directors took seriously.  The press announced that Elon was buying Twitter.  The regressive party (so-called "conservatives") rejoiced that "free speech and the First Amendment" would be restored, that Donald Trump would be restored to his Twitter platform of awfulness, and that the voices that they did not like (the progressives) would finally be silenced.  (Yes, so much for "free speech.")

A few more days have passed and the details are coming out.  Elon planned to use Tesla and/or SpaceX stock for multibillion dollar loans to cover part of the purchase price, and he claimed he has some backers to cover the rest.  Well, except that Tesla (TSLA) fell from about $1000/share to about $800/share in a day or so, causing Elon to lose billions of dollars.  TSLA, itself, is currently about $900B in market cap, so it was over $1T (trillion) in market cap before Elon announced that he had secured financing.  I do not know how much Elon lost, but I am guessing he lost tens of billions of dollars in the slump.

It was reported today that Elon may have lost enough on TSLA that he can no longer afford the purchase.  The report suggested that there is a $1B (billion) penalty if the acquisition does not proceed.  

I belabor all this because Elon is a lucky jerk and a poor businessman.  He spoke off the cuff to the tune of billions of dollars and I hope he pays for his stupidity.  I cannot see that he has any idea how to improve Twitter (as much as it needs improvement) and he has skirted (broken) SEC regulations several times.  I hope he gets what he deserves in this instance.

Edit to add: here is Elon's view of the political world.  His self-proclaimed victimhood is on glaring display.  

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144

If you plotted Dwight Eisenhower on Elon's chart, Dwight would today be far-left but he was a steady conservative in his day.  Now tell me again how the political spectrum has changed?